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The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.

What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…

… like this one, which is right aligned.

Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.

If your theme supports it, you’ll see the “wide” button on the image toolbar. Give it a try.

Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.

The Inserter Tool

Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.

Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:

Text & Headings

Images & Videos

Galleries

Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.

Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.

And Lists like this one of course 🙂

Visual Editing

A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

Matt Mullenweg, 2017

The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.

Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.

You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.

Media Rich

If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:

Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.

The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.

Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:

You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:

Code is Poetry

The WordPress community

If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.

Most February’s I remember this was the month my father passed away it draws my mind to remember what I can about him and about that time in my family, so I am writing down a few salient memories so that I don’t forget

My father passed away exactly 60 years ago on the 23rd of this month. He was born on February 4, 1904, and was the 10th of fourteen children.

For all the time that I knew him, he always had two jobs. A full-time job he worked during the day at the MTA where he was a mechanic and a laborer In the evenings he had a part-time job as a janitor at Dewey and Almy Chemical Company. We didn’t own a car, so he walked to and from both jobs.

I remember my father’s hands, the skin on the front of both hands was tough, thick hard solid calluses. As a young boy, I was amazed by them.

Dad is the sixth Guy from the right, wearing the hat and smiling

He went into the first job very early in the morning before we got up for school and I remember my mother would get up with him to cook his breakfast and make him lunch.

Later in the day when he came in from working, I can remember that he would lay down on the bed to rest while my mother made him a cup of tea and a bite to eat before going out to the second job. I’m not sure, but I think he only had about an hour at home between jobs

He would get his tea in a cup and saucer. He would tip the cup up to spill some of the hot tea into the saucer to let it cool, and then he would drink it out of the saucer. I think he saw his father do it that way period.

The eight of us lived in a two-bedroom apartment at 137 Dudley Street Cambridge at that time.

My oldest sister Ann was just sixteen when dad died, my brother Jim was fifteen, I was ten, and my three younger sisters, Mary, Betty, and Patsi would have been seven, six and five years old.

My mother had not worked outside of the house in years and did not have a driver’s license at the time.

It was a long time ago, so my memory is, of course, foggy of exactly how I felt at that point, but I do remember it was surreal.

For the longest time I remember not believing that he died, I told myself that it was all a terrible mistake and I half expected to see him when I came home from school one day he would be there, and my mother would be getting his dinner and a cup of tea for him. I don’t think I could absorb the fact that he had died.

I see a few people here in the community where I live now that still have one or both of their parents with them and I tell them how lucky I think they are. I know there are challenges with aging parents sometimes very significant problems, but what I wouldn’t give to be able to talk to my father and my mother now.

You probably know the feeling all too well: You arrive at the office with a clear plan for the day and then, in what feels like just a moment, you find yourself on your way back home. Nine or 10 hours have passed but you’ve accomplished only a few of your priorities. And, most likely, you can’t even remember exactly what you did all day. If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Research shows that people spend almost 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing. In other words, many of us operate on autopilot.

Add to this that we have entered what many people are calling the “attention economy.” In the attention economy, the ability to maintain focus and concentration is every bit as important as technical or management skills. And because leaders need to absorb and synthesize a growing flood of information in order to make good decisions, they’re hit particularly hard by this emerging trend.

The good news is you can train your brain to focus better by incorporating mindfulness exercises throughout your day. Based on our experience with thousands of leaders in over 250 organizations, here are some guidelines for becoming a more focused and mindful leader.

It’s Monday afternoon and maybe that second cup of coffee isn’t getting your brain geared quite the way you expected it to (although maybe another three will be okay, according to a Harvard neuroscientist.)

When you’ve hit a wall at work, this video from New York Magazine’s Science of Us suggests it’s time to go into tinker-mode. Research on creative problem solving shows people don’t spend enough time in this phase. The solution? Keep at it. People come up with better solutions the longer they spend working on them.

Tinkering is key—the brain has “leaky filters,” as science columnist Sharon Begley writes. When we give ourselves the time, disparate items can sift together to form new combinations: the essence of creativity.

When you’ve hit a wall at work, this video from New York Magazine’s Science of Us suggests it’s time to go into tinker-mode. Research on creative problem solving shows people don’t spend enough time in this phase. The solution? Keep at it. People come up with better solutions the longer they spend working on them.

It has been said that the highest form of prayer is giving thanks. Instead of praying for different circumstances, give thanks for what you have. (You’ll see why.)

“I finally learned a big lesson. I now know I can be beaten and broken. I’m not as tough and crafty as I thought. I see clearly now what was blind to me just yesterday morning. At this point, it’s the only good thing that came out of all of this. But in a way, it’s all I need. I know myself better today than I did yesterday, and know what I have to do.”

If only global warming were caused by ISIS declaring a “weather war” on the west, perhaps by gleefully releasing 18 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day and gloating when droughts, deluges, heat waves, killer storms, wildfires, or floods ensued. That might incite more people to get upset about it.

In fact, global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of all those events, as well as raising sea levels. But it comes from something quite different from an evil-looking terrorist. The sources—such as power plants, vehicles, farms, and factories—are impersonal and invisible, and close to home—the way we use energy, not the machinations of a foreigner. Faced with a threat with these attributes, the brain reacts with an unimpressed meh: Our minds evolved to detect and respond to threats that have certain features, and global warming has none of them.

In terms of getting people to care about global warming enough to demand a government response or to take personal action, “you couldn’t design a problem that’s a worse fit for our psychology,” Andrew Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications, told me.

Countless polls have documented the lack of concern about global warming and the resulting climate change, which threatens to exact an enormous financial and human toll. The Yale Project’s 2015 survey, for instance, found that about 16% of US adults are die-hard climate deniers, rejecting the scientific research that has documented how the rise in greenhouse gases from human activities (primarily burning coal, oil, and natural gas) is trapping heat in the planet’s atmosphere and altering Earth’s climate. While another 63% believe (correctly) that global warming is happening, only 48% believe (also correctly) that it is due to human activities. Just 41% know that the vast majority of climatologists have reached that conclusion. This has been widely and repeatedly reported in the media, so when people say they do not “believe” these facts, or don’t care about them, it suggests something in their psychology is at fault.